Bill Cosby has some nerve talking about “personal
responsibility.” On May 17, with no warning, the 67-year-old multimillionaire
comedian ambushed three venerable Black organizations – the NAACP,
the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, and Howard University
– fatally disrupting a gala celebration of the 50th anniversary
of the Brown desegregation decision. Cosby drew from the
hip (or the lip) to spray the hall with generalized insults against
people who weren’t even there: the Black poor who, he said, “are
not holding up their end in this deal.”

Apparently, Cosby thinks he is one of the deal-makers,
and that he’s been cheated. The mostly Black, tuxedoed attendees
at Washington’s Constitution Hall, forced to bear witness to Cosby’s
tirade, were also to blame “in this deal” since they had collectively
failed to sufficiently call the “lower economic people” to account
for their “personal responsibility” deficits.

Not once did it occur to “Cos” that he owed his
immediate and larger audience the benefit of a well-prepared presentation.
Dr. Cosby saw no need to buttress his rant with a single reliable
fact, nor to provide a coherent structure for his argument, so
that reasonable people might arrive at some useful conclusions.
Instead, he played the elderly “shock jock,” frothing and flailing
away, spewing a sewer of abuse that, if directed against other
ethnic groups, would be considered blood libels. (See a compilation
of “Cosbyisms” at the end of this essay.)

The super-successful entertainer, famed for his
practiced timing and flawless delivery, the evangelist of education
– the discipline in which he received his Ph.D. – displayed an
utter disrespect for his audience and for the august occasion
of the anniversary. His extended outburst, presented without the
evident benefit of even the most rudimentary preparation, was
a gross violation of professional and personal discipline – an
affront Cosby would never commit against a half-drunk nightclub
crowd, much less the corporate and university audiences he regularly
addresses. Yet he gave free rein to his inner demons in front
of a throng of African Americans at Constitution Hall on the anniversary
of Brown.

The irresponsible icon

Icons always have apologists; Cosby has a media-full.
Black people who should be insulted, instead make excuses for
Cosby’s shameful, impulsive, totally uninhibited behavior that,
in a non-icon, would invite suspicions of substance abuse.

USA Today’s Black columnist DeWayne
Wickham – normally a smart fellow – sugarcoats Cosby’s bile
as “talking black” – as if Black discussions of public policy,
including subjects as momentous as the Fate of the Race, are by
definition devoid of substance, structure, precision or logic.
A similar exculpatory current runs through most corporate newspaper
columns penned by Black writers in the wake of the Cosby abomination.

Amazingly,
the out-of-control, grotesquely self-indulgent comedian was roundly
praised for his “courage” in confronting the supposed Black phobia
against “airing dirty linen” in public, i.e., within hearing distance
of whites. How perverse and ironic! Much of the Black talking
classes forgive Cosby’s clear lack of a sense of “personal responsibility”
and elementary decorum, precisely because to do otherwise would
risk diminishing a Black icon – in front of white people! Better
to let Cosby’s insults to African Americans, slide.

And since when was it an act of courage to badmouth
poor Black people in America?

By simple standards of civility Cosby is guilty
of an extreme lapse in “personal responsibility” by dint of his
behavior to his audience and to the millions of people he slandered.
More to the point, Cosby doesn’t know the meaning of the term
– and neither do most of the Black chatterers who have been bandying
it about.

Role Model mogul

What do the various political actors mean by “personal
responsibility?” Certainly, we know that in the mouths of Republicans
and their Black camp followers “personal responsibility” is a
code for what people are told to exercise when the state refuses
to see to the general welfare of its non-rich citizens. We know
that song. But what does Cosby mean, and why are otherwise progressive
Black writers and politicians bending over backwards to find ways
to agree with him?

An enormous vacuity surrounds the Black discussion
over Cosby’s remarks. People rush to say “yes” to a term, the
definition of which is not necessarily shared or understood. Where
does “personal responsibility” end and “social responsibility”
begin? If a comedian turned demagogue can hector a substantial
portion of a race of people to behave as he (vaguely) commands,
then surely he is talking politics, not just giving advice to
individuals. Cosby’s politics are in fact rooted on the conservative
side of the Black spectrum – that is, when he is being coherent
at all.

”Cosby was saying the same thing backstage when
I interviewed him during my college days. It was 1968, but he
didn't want to talk about black power, Black Panthers or cultural
revolutions. He wanted to complain about why so many young blacks
of my generation were wasting the great opportunities that hard-won
civil rights victories had brought us. In those politically polarized
times, I was disappointed by his traditionalist attitude. But
I appreciate its wisdom today with new eyes, the eyes of a parent.”

Actually, Page appreciates Cosby with the “new”
eyes of a highly paid corporate journalist who finds enough common
ground with white conservatives to appear regularly on shows like
The McLaughlin Group.

Thirty-two years later, Cosby was still urging young
people on campus to be politically passive. At Franklin &
Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania in May, 2000, he warned
students:

”Those of you going to grad school, listen to
me carefully… I know you have an idea of how you want to make
a change in the world. That is not what grad school is for.
Do what they tell you to do and then when you graduate, do what
you want to do. That is what grad school is for. If you're gonna
argue with the professor you're going to not get a good grade,
you're not going to graduate in grad school. Okay? So take your
young idea, study what they want you to study, kick tail and
then when you get your turn to write your dissertation then
you tell it the way it ought to be told.

”It is not for you to stand up and argue… You
get an A on all the tests and then, make your move.”

By that, Cosby meant, make your personal career
move. Don’t dabble in campus politics, or challenge the orthodoxy
of those in power at the institution. Shut up.

Because of men and women who shared Cosby’s worldview,
many Black college campuses were relatively quiet during the Civil
Rights Movement, a silence enforced by Black administrators who
did not hesitate to expel students and fire faculty who sought
any change whatsoever in the status quo, on or off campus. Later
in the Sixties, Blacks on white college campuses tended to be
significantly more activist than students at traditionally Black
schools, largely because they were not smothered by a “tradition”
hostile to mass Black political activity.

Cosby
advocates a neutered Black politics of individual striving within
the parameters that are allowed by those in power. He projects
his own, self-invented persona as a “role model” for African Americans
to follow as individuals, while rejecting collective action
to alter power relationships. His message: Each of you people
should do as I did. Cosby’s method is derived from a long line
of accommodationist Negro leaders whose message was the equivalent
of, “Eat your Jell-O.”

Ironically, the young Cosby did not follow traditionalist
counsel. He dropped out of college to pursue the wildly perilous
career of Black standup comedian in a largely segregated America.
Had he failed as a comic – as the odds overwhelmingly dictated
– without a good education he might not have been able to buy
his mother a fine house far from the projects where he grew up.
Luckily, Cosby the dropout didn’t listen to people like – Cosby.

Spurned, vengeful benefactor

Cosby bucked the odds, but never the system. His
job was to become a Role Model for a Black presence within the
existing order. Once that was accomplished, he added a make-believe
family to the Model: the Huxtables. Writer Khalil Tian Shahyd
“wasn’t surprised at all” at the tone of Cosby’s Constitution
Hall remarks:

After all, for more than a decade he presented us
every Thursday with what he thought the ideal African-American
family should look like. That we should listen to jazz, and have
people like BB King come into our home for dinner and invite us
to sit front row at his shows. Take weekend trips by limo to the
most expensive hotel in the city for dinner and pampering just
to treat our partners to a day without the children. Live in a
big house with not one neighbor of color, where our children
shave their heads to appear in a skin head rock video and are
sheltered from the real world of zero sum politics, gentrification,
under-funded and abandoned school districts, swelling prison populations,
racial profiling, economic marginalization, domestic abuse and
all those specifically “poverty based social ills.”

In addition to making Cosby a lot richer, the TV
show proved that a Black-cast show could hold white people’s attention
in prime time for multiple seasons. This was considered a great
victory. The ideal Black Role Model – Cosby himself, or the self
he created – was now the entire nation’s Role Model for Black
people. Heady stuff.

Role Model Politics is nearly as emotion-laden as
cult-of-personality politics – and just as divorced from reality.
The Role Model is, by definition, the template of righteousness
and progress. Those who fail to follow the Role Model’s path are
rejecting the Model’s persona. No wonder Cosby goes ballistic
at poor Black people’s behavior – or what he imagines that behavior
to be. He takes it personally. It’s as if “those people” are all
playing the “dozens” at his expense. How else to explain the explosive
vitriol of Cosby’s Constitution Hall performance?

However,
Cosby’s inability to perceive that he is obligated as a matter
of “personal responsibility” to atone for his blanket verbal assaults,
is his personal problem. It is far more worrisome that
so many Black opinion molders harbor similar attitudes towards
politics and the poor. Cosby showed his ass, but the same ill
winds are blowing through the spaces in lots of Black skulls in
high places. Deep down, they value other Black people little,
and trust them less. They would rather celebrate virtual
social mobility (the “Huxtables”) than fight for the material
resources that bring the possibility of dignity to millions. They
see more virtue in a millionaire parting with a fraction of his
money – although never enough to risk falling out of wealth –
than in the selfless work of thousands of community organizers
and activists who are motivated by a sense of both personal and
social responsibility.

Dr. King and Malcolm X and Fred Hampton died in
a social struggle to empower Black people. Cosby demonizes these
same people, employing the enemy’s language, like some vengeful,
spurned benefactor. Yet much of Black media pretend not to see
the throbbing ugliness in their icon, thus calling into question
their own fitness. In the face of a brazen assault on the human
dignity of African Americans, they equivocate – or join in the
mass lynching. Mimicking racists, they impose yet another burden
on the already super-disadvantaged Black poor. As Paul Street
wrote in the April
8 issue of :

”The harsh material and structural-racist reality
of American society interacts with timeworn, victim-blaming ruling-class
explanations of poverty to play an ugly game on the nation’s most
truly disadvantaged. They are expected to magically leap
beyond their social-historical circumstances – to exercise an
inordinately high degree of sound personal responsibility just
to keep their heads above water – while others are structurally
empowered to “pass Go and collect $2 million” without such exercise,
and indeed to deepen the well of black disadvantage.”

If huge numbers of Black people could be drawn together
to figure out precisely how we have failed each other,
that would be one helluva “social responsibility” conversation.
But the Bill Cosbys of the community cannot be allowed to hog
the microphone, just because they may have paid for it. As journalist-educator-lawyer-activist
Lizz Brown
says, “That doesn’t give him license.”

In truth, we can’t afford Bill Cosby anymore. He
costs more than he gives.

Bill Cosbyisms

Cosby on the Black poor:

"Lower economic people are not holding up their
end in this deal. These people are not parenting. They are buying
things for kids – $500 sneakers for what? And won't spend $200
for 'Hooked on Phonics.' "

Cosby on Black youth culture:

"People putting their clothes on backwards:
Isn't that a sign of something gone wrong? ... People with their
hats on backwards, pants down around the crack, isn't that a
sign of something, or are you waiting for Jesus to pull his
pants up? Isn't it a sign of something when she has her dress
all the way up to the crack and got all type of needles [piercings]
going through her body? What part of Africa did this come from?
Those people are not Africans; they don't know a damn thing
about Africa."

Cosby on civil rights:

"Brown versus the Board of Education is no
longer the white person's problem. We have got to take the neighborhood
back. We have to go in there – forget about telling your child
to go into the Peace Corps – it is right around the corner. They
are standing on the corner and they can't speak English."

Cosby on literacy:

"Basketball players – multimillionaires – can't
write a paragraph. Football players – multimillionaires – can't
read. Yes, multimillionaires. Well, Brown versus Board of Education:
Where are we today? They paved the way, but what did we do with
it? That white man, he's laughing. He's got to be laughing: 50
percent drop out, the rest of them are in prison."

Cosby on poor Black women:

"Five, six children – same woman – eight, 10
different husbands or whatever. Pretty soon you are going to have
DNA cards to tell who you are making love to. You don't know who
this is. It might be your grandmother. I am telling you, they're
young enough! Hey, you have a baby when you are 12; your baby
turns 13 and has a baby. How old are you? Huh? Grandmother! By
the time you are 12 you can have sex with your grandmother, you
keep those numbers coming. I'm just predicting."

Cosby on the sons and daughters of poor,
Black, unmarried mothers:

"…with names like Shaniqua, Taliqua and Mohammed
[!] and all of that crap, and all of them are in jail.

Cosby on Blacks shot by police:

"These are not political criminals. These are
people going around stealing Coca-Cola. People getting shot in
the back of the head over a piece of pound cake and then we run
out and we are outraged, [saying] 'The cops shouldn't have
shot him.' What the hell was he doing with the pound cake in his
hand?"